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We consider a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

We consider the best arm identification problem, where the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward from a set of $K$ arms under a limited sampling budget. This problem models many practical scenarios such as A/B testing. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Junpei Komiyama , Kyoungseok Jang , Junya Honda

We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Marc Jourdan , Emilie Kaufmann , Rémy Degenne

We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Brijen Thananjeyan , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Ion Stoica , Michael I. Jordan , Ken Goldberg , Joseph E. Gonzalez

In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Multi-task representation learning is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating knowledge transfer and improving sample efficiency. This paper introduces a novel approach to multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-17 Alexandra Carpentier , Alessandro Lazaric , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Rémi Munos , Peter Auer , András Antos

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

This paper proposes a variant of multiple-play stochastic bandits tailored to resource allocation problems arising from LLM applications, edge intelligence, etc. The model is composed of $M$ arms and $K$ plays. Each arm has a stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Hong Xie , Haoran Gu , Yanying Huang , Tao Tan , Defu Lian

We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 El Mehdi Saad , Victor Thuot , Nicolas Verzelen

Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Ravi Kumar Kolla , Prashanth L. A. , Aditya Gopalan , Krishna Jagannathan , Michael Fu , Steve Marcus

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

The pure-exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits aims to find one or more arms with the largest (or near largest) means. Examples include finding an {\epsilon}-good arm, best-arm identification, top-k arm identification, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Blake Mason , Lalit Jain , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

Recently, there has been remarkable progress in reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. However, all these works only provide regret or sample complexity guarantees. It is still an open question if one can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yue Wu , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We study the problem of representation learning in stochastic contextual linear bandits. While the primary concern in this domain is usually to find realizable representations (i.e., those that allow predicting the reward function at any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Papini , Ahmed Touati , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

We consider a bandit problem over a graph where the rewards are not directly observed. Instead, the decision maker can compare two nodes and receive (stochastic) information pertaining to the difference in their value. The graph structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-13 Dotan Di Castro , Claudio Gentile , Shie Mannor

We study fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Qirun Zeng , Xuchuang Wang , Jiayi Shen , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , Jinhang Zuo

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Jasmin Brandt , Viktor Bengs , Björn Haddenhorst , Eyke Hüllermeier

Representation learning based on multi-task pretraining has become a powerful approach in many domains. In particular, task-aware representation learning aims to learn an optimal representation for a specific target task by sampling data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Yifang Chen , Yingbing Huang , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson , Guanya Shi